Competition from Fish Farming in Influencing Rent Dissipation: The Crawfish Fishery

As fish farming has emerged to compete with a preexisting common property fishery sector, rent dissipation and consequently welfare losses may be reduced. Fish farming increases the increment to supply resulting in lower prices, which reduces the quantity supplied by the commons. Welfare gains accrue only when marginal cost is rising faster than average cost, which is the usual case in the wild fisheries. Using data from the Louisiana pond and wild crawfishing industries, it was shown that for the year 1978, fish farming of crawfish reduced potential welfare losses by 76 percent.